Guest Bloggers

March 06, 2015

My sincere thanks to Stacey Harwood and BAP for inviting me to be a guest blogger this week. It’s been a process and an adventure to give focused consideration to each of my posts, revisit themes that are important to me as a person and a writer, and share them with BAP’s readers. I welcome hearing from you if you have comments or questions and look forward to continuing the exchange. Thank you for reading—for paying attention. —ML

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"Sometimes life presents us with large, painful, unanswerable questions, and we cannot simply ‘get over them.’" —Roger Ebert, from his review of Maboroshi

When I feel saturated with words and thoughts, I turn to images to recalibrate. I first watched Kore-eda Hirokazu’s exquisitely beautiful and sad film Maboroshi no Hikari (Maborosi is the English title) alone at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District. The word “maboroshi” 幻の光 roughly translates as “phantom light” or “mysterious light”. The film made such an impression on me that I went home and wrote about it in my journal, so have the date: December 5, 1996. I’d run across an ad for it in the Roxie’s free announcement sheet and something about the thumbnail synopsis intrigued me enough to travel across town on a weeknight to see it. Maboroshi is Kore-eda’s debut film and remains my favorite of his. Over the years I’ve internalized its moods and layers with numerous viewings. As certain books synchronistically “appear” in our lives when we most need them, Maboroshi was exactly the film I needed at that juncture in my life. I was reeling from a personal loss and was at loose ends, swimming in the liminal, with absolutely no idea which way to turn or how to configure my life. In its way, the film provided a tether, an empathic lens through which I could begin to understand my own loss and feel seen and understood. This is what great art can do.

The film opens with a memory or dream of a grandmother leaving her son’s family to return to her home village “to die”. As the old woman walks across a bridge, a young Yumiko (the film's protagonist) runs after her, begging her to come back, but the old woman keeps walking. She doesn’t return. Fast forward to Yumiko as a 20 year-old adult: she’s living in Osaka in a small apartment near the train tracks and is married to her childhood friend Ikuo, who works in a factory. They have an infant son, Yuichi. The couple’s relationship is playful and affectionate. One day Ikuo doesn’t return from work and a policeman arrives at their apartment to give Yumiko the news: Ikuo has been killed by a train as he was walking on the tracks. As his body has been disfigured by the trauma, the police don’t allow Yumiko to see it. The subsequent scenes of Yumiko’s grieving are wordless and, except for a minimalist score, imbued with deep silence.

Five years later, a matchmaker introduces Yumiko to a widower with a young daughter a little older than Yuichi. They live in a remote fishing village (Noto) on the Japan Sea. Yumiko agrees to marry him and moves to Noto with her young son. The widower, his daughter, and his aging father welcome the young woman and her child and present them to the community. Yumiko's new husband is kind and patient and gives her time to acclimate. The children take an immediate liking to one another. Things seem to be looking up for Yumiko. But she continues to be haunted by the mysterious and violent circumstances of her first husband’s death.

Stephen Holden described Maboroshi in the New York Times as “a pictorial tone poem of astonishing visual intensity and emotional depth. Watching the film, which has little dialogue and many lingering shots of the Japanese landscape, one has an uncanny sense of entering the consciousness of the main character and seeing through her eyes….. Instead of searching for psychological explanations, it discerns a deeper design for Yumiko’s life.” [italics mine]

The works of art that profoundly mark our psyches are the ones we return to again and again. Maboroshi is such a work for me. More than anything, it helped me to live with “large, painful, unanswerable questions” when little else could. I’ll leave you with the English-subtitled trailer.

March 05, 2015

I was clearing out my desk at home and stumbled over an old cassette tape—a dance mix that my friend and former housemate Lawrence Fine and I put together for our annual Halloween party.

Had no idea what was on the tape but I dug out an old boombox that plays cassettes and popped it in. Here’s what we were shaking our moneymakers to on Halloween night of ‘89, just a few days before the Berlin Wall came crashing down...

Chaka Khan – “Signed, Sealed Delivered”

Greg Kihn Band – “Our Love’s in Jeopardy”

Marvin Gaye – “Heard it through the Grapevine”

Katrina and the Waves – “I’m Walking through Sunshine”

Edgar Winter’s Band – “Give it Everything You Got”

The Fixx – “One Thing Leads to Another”

Power Station (with Robert Palmer) – “Some Like it Hot”

Yes – “Owner of a Lonely Heart”

The Kinks – “You Really Got Me”

Wang Chung – “Everybody Wang Chung Tonight”

Herbie Hancock – “Rockit”

Michael Jackson – “Thriller”

If you want a dance mix now, you get on your iPhone, pluck some tunes from your list and you’re all set. Takes fifteen, twenty minutes. Back in the day you had to grab an album, put the needle on the blank spot and turn on the cassette deck. And if the record skipped fifteen seconds before the end of the cut you cussed, backed up the tape and recorded something else over it. Lawrence and I spent a week making that thing.

But it was worth it; our annual Halloween party was circled in red on our friends’ social calendars. The hangout, eat and drink area was on the first floor; the basement dance room was tricked out with lights and a killer sound system. And we had themes: one year it was the Wizard of Oz. I rented a scruffy Cowardly Lion outfit, but Lawrence wouldn’t settle for no steenkin’ rental. A master craftsman, he bought a roll of roofing tin and spent a month before the party making an incredible Tin Man outfit with articulated joints. He could have won any costume contest in Boston with that thing, but he was perfectly happy to wear it at our party, collect his rightful share of “oooohs” and “ahhhhs”, and hang it on the wall afterwards.

One year I went as Tammy Faye Baker (big blonde wig, lavender gown, fake eyelashes and hyperbolic makeup.) Another time, in a nod to my Catholic schoolboy roots, I bought a nun’s outfit at a costume shop and wandered the party as “Nun of the Above.” Someone asked, “Tell me sister, which of the snacks your friends have provided does the Lord like most?”

I calmly replied, “All snacks are created equal in the eyes of God.”

Good times…

Charles Coe is author of two books of poetry: “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents” and “Picnic on the Moon,” both published by Leapfrog Press. His poetry has appeared in a number of literary reviews and anthologies, including Poesis, The Mom Egg, Solstice Literary Review, and Urban Nature. He is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Charles’s poems have been set by a number of composers, including Beth Denisch, Julia Carey and Robert Moran. A short film based on his poem “Fortress” is currently in production by filmmaker Roberto Mighty. Charles is co-chair of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union for freelance writers. He was selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light for 2014.” His novella, "Spin Cycles," was published in November, 2014 by Gemma Media.

Sixth grade, a new kid came, Fat kid, terrible at sports, But a genius, played the violin, And when we got math workbooks On the first day of sixth grade He finished the workbook that night, Was supposed to take a year!

So smart was he that the teachers Hated him, put the kid in front Of the class and said, ‘Do you believe In God or are you too smart to believe In God?’ The kid said he didn’t know At first but finally said he did believe In God, because he had to.

Once at lunch he said the name Jascha Heifetz and we all laughed At the name and wanted him To say it again but he wouldn’t Say it because he didn’t like us Laughing at the name Jascha Heifetz That was like somebody sneezing.

Then one day at a movie theater We were buying popcorn and there Was a cardboard cutout of a guy With a guitar and the kid said to me, ‘It’s Elvis Presley’ and I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘It’s Elvis Presley, he was on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show last Sunday.’

How strange, how unlikely it now Seems, my introduction to Elvis Presley. But we shared a destiny, the kid and I -- So years later, when I fell in love with His wife, I was all shook up: my hands Were shaky, my knees were weak, I couldn’t stand on my own two feet.

Now retired from his laundry route but still working at the motel Saturdays and Sundays, my father goes to the racetrack almost every weekday—Aqueduct fall and winter, Belmont spring and summer. Some days he never sees a horse in the flesh, betting at the last minute and watching the monitors under the stands.

He has developed dozens of ten-seconds-at-a-time relationships: “Did the two catch the nine?” “Why didn’t he go to the whip sooner?” “They shoulda never taken him down; I’ve seen much worse.”

On a trip to Las Vegas, at the Riviera Sportsbook, he comes across one of the racetrack faces and he says, “Hey, I know you.” The other man sticks out his hand and says, “Yeah. From the track. Mort.”

“Matt.”

Back at the track, they become friendly, without last names or phone numbers. Mort always comes with Terry, who does all the driving. My father refers to them as “the boys.” If one of the boys is sick or away, neither comes. Days can go by without them, then the boys are back without missing a beat: “The seven hates the mud.” “I thought the three was going to steal it.”

My father and Mort plan their Vegas trips to overlap whenever possible. They watch races together at the Riviera, get each other coffee and bagels, and go their own ways at night. Mort often exasperates my father, arguing that the nine came in when it was clear that the four overtook him, or that Frank Sinatra is playing the Sands, when it’s Frank Sinatra Junior: “Yeah, that’s what I said, Frank Sinatra!”

Weeks go by without the boys showing up at the track, longer than ever before. My father spots a guy who hangs out with them, and asks him if he knows what’s up.

The following is adapted from Betwixt and Between: Embracing the Borderlands of My Mixed Heritage, a piece I wrote for Discover Nikkei in January 2013.

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“I wish to work perpetually on the borders—to me, it is a place of potent unresolve—untainted by one culture (camp) or another, a limbo in which I am free to create my own citizenship and, hopefully, my own gods.” —Ocean Vuong

The symbolic and psychological meanings of “borderlands”—both internal and external—have been my preoccupation for years, as a poet, writer, and woman of mixed Japanese ancestry. It’s a preoccupation that comes with the territory. I am the daughter of a Japanese mother from an upper middle-class family and a New Englander father of French Canadian heritage who grew up in a working class, bilingual family. My parents raised my brother and me with both cultures in various locations in California, Micronesia, and Japan. This last is why I also consider myself an adult Third Culture Kid—a person who’s been raised in places and cultures other than her parents’ passport country/countries. TCKs internalize aspects of all the cultures in which they’ve been immersed while not having full ownership in any. Consequently, I’m adaptable, curious, restless, and can live pretty much anywhere. My least favorite question is “Where are you from?” because it is impossible to answer. I’m from everywhere and nowhere. If I were to use a food metaphor to describe my internal experience, Asian hot pot (or nabemono in Japanese) probably comes closest. Although I mostly felt “other” as a younger person, and not in an affirming sense, in midlife I’ve finally learned to settle into and appreciate my unique background and have mostly let go of struggling to “fit in”. I’ve come to learn that I prefer the in-between.

In late 2012 I relocated to the Los Angeles area after more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. L.A.’s a good place for in-between-ers. In this sprawling metropolis with no center, a place that’s in a perpetual state of transience and flux and whose population represents every culture and continent, I can finally enjoy a sense of internal and external spaciousness. L.A., like Hawai’i, is a place where I can blend in and feel like myself—all of my selves.

When I’m not in Japan—a country that I consider my spiritual home and love to visit when I can—my primary contact with Japanese culture has been via my excursions to Japantowns in the Bay Area (San Francisco and San Jose) and now Los Angeles (Little Tokyo, Sawtelle, and Gardena). I don’t think of myself as Japanese American because that’s an identity, a community’s history, that my mother’s family doesn’t share. To me, the Japanese American experience seems to be intrinsically tied to the internment on U.S. soil of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. That said, there is something deeply nourishing about spending time in J-town, an urban borderland that’s not America and not Japan, but where I find solace—a feeling that’s almost belonging—in familiar objects, images, and food.

In J-town I can connect with my mother and all the meaning she and her culture have held for me. Few things make me happier than spending an afternoon alone, wandering the narrow arcades and browsing the cluttered shops. I like to eat a comforting lunch of oyakodonburi (literally "parent and child"—seasoned chicken and egg over hot rice) or tempura soba (deep-fried prawns over buckwheat noodles and broth), window shop, and haunt the aisles of Kinokuniya Books—unable to read much Japanese, but savoring the sight of kanji-covered book spines and splashy pop-culture magazines, the sumptuous color photographs in books about Japanese gardens, traditional farmhouses, art, cooking, flower arranging, and more. In downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, there’s the added bonus of the beautiful Japanese American National Museum, an important community resource. The gift shop alone is worth a visit. I once spent several hours there reading through all of Allen Say’s gorgeous picture books. Somehow I feel better, more cohesive and grounded, after these J-town afternoons.

In Japanese British filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s excellent documentary Neither Here Nor There, she movingly describes her own struggle to define and integrate the various strands of her mixed heritage and growing up between Japan and England. Like Yamazaki, I am learning how to be “other” and yet also belong.

March 04, 2015

About twenty years ago in Nashville, when Philip Levine was Vanderbilt University’s visiting writer, there was a Burger King on 21st Avenue South, at the edge of the college’s magnolia-fringed campus. It had a large parking lot that butted up next to a place called San Antonio Taco, where Vanderbilt students lined up to buy galvanized buckets of long necked beers on ice to ease down their guacamole tacos and buffalo wings. The parking lot belonged to Burger King, but SATCO customers often parked there.

Nowadays, Panera Bread (which has replaced the Burger King) employs a large, male security guard festooned with handcuffs and a police baton to patrol the lot, making sure the spaces reserved for Panera customers go to Panera customers. But back in 1995, Burger King had a sole female employee performing that job. Anyone who’s spent time around college students can tell you it’s dangerous to get between them and their beer. So it was not unusual to see this woman – in her late fifties, early sixties – running out of Burger King in her brown polyester BK uniform, a matching kerchief flapping around her neck, a matching cap bobby-pinned to her dyed blond hair. Like a lot of people who do these kinds of jobs, she was a good employee, and took her work seriously. To discourage the students from parking where they wanted to park, she sometimes shook a rag at them, sometimes she just called out. Overwhelmingly, (of course) they ignored her. When she wasn’t trying to chase off illegal parkers, her duty was picking up trash. You’d have thought anyone could see it was a miserable job, and taken pity. Still, it was a job, right? And in 1995, she must have been making $4.25/hour – minimum wage at that time – $170/week if she worked full time. Some of the students called her the Burger Bitch. I just hope she never knew…

As it happened, my colleague and best-friend-of-Vanderbilt Creative Writing, Vereen Bell, sometimes had a cup of coffee and did a little last minute paper grading in the Burger King before crossing the street to class. It was convenient, cheap, quiet. It’s hard to describe Vereen: somewhere in his late 70s now, he’s an iconic figure at Vanderbilt where he’s taught for more than half a century, he’s pretty much transformed the English Department from its midcentury roster of white-men-teaching-white-men into the lively, diversified department it is today. (Read about Vereen here)

In the English Department, we were thrilled when Phil won the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth on April 18, 1995. He actually took the call in his office with his door open. Vereen was in his office, across the hall, ready with a bottle of bourbon. I was in an office just a few doors down – brand new to Vanderbilt, taken aback by its surface formality and the constraints of a conservative campus culture. “Please be quiet,” warned a placard hung in the hall outside the department. “Voices can be heard from within.” I’d never been part of an English Department where talking was discouraged…

As soon as Phil confirmed he had won (“Yes. Isn’t it sweet?” he said to my colleague, Mark Jarman.), I watched in astonishment as various faculty and staff rushed up and down the hall, arms full of liquor bottles, or wrapped around trash cans, commandeered as ice buckets. Soon, a full blown party was underway in the Department’s Duncan Library. What I remember best is the expression on Phil’s face – bemused, pleased, still something a little bit held back (maybe because Franny wasn’t there). I read later that he said, of the Pulitzer, “If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good.” His face reflected those split emotions that afternoon.

Well, what does this have to do with the Burger Bitch, her miserable job, and her pathetic little life picking up trash and chasing drunk college students out of Burger King’s parking lot?

Just this: when Phil gave a poetry reading at Vanderbilt later that semester, Vereen Bell introduced him. The reading was packed. When it was time, Vereen unfolded his tall frame and made his way to the podium. In his slow-paced and garrulous manner, with his soothing, south Georgia accent, he began to talk, bypassing entirely the impressive literary credentials of Philip Levine. He told, instead, the story of the Burger Bitch, how he had started talking with her one day as she went about her trash-dumping duties.

“She came and sat down at the table with me,” he said. “She told me what her job was, and how hard it was, how difficult it was to get the students to listen to her.

“Then she asked me what my job was. ‘Well,’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed, ‘I teach over there at the college.’ She brightened up right away. ‘You do?’ she answered. ‘Then would you do something for me?’ ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Would you please tell those girls not to laugh at me because of my job?’”

In the audience, our own laughter, our wry smiles, the subtly self-congratulatory atmosphere we’d created around ourselves of having a Pulitzer Prize winner on faculty dissipated instantaneously.

For a few seconds – and I will never forget the feel in the room – Vereen let us sit in that.

And then he said, “Maybe you wonder why I’m telling you this story. Well, it’s because it’s the best way I can I can think of to introduce Philip Levine. He understands how that woman who works in the parking lot at Burger King feels about things. And he writes poems about it.”

Now, that introduction – so astonishingly apt, so unique in American poetry – has become Phil’s epitaph…

Kate Daniels is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book is A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (LSU: 2011). It includes “Crowns,” a poem she wrote for Philip Levine.

American poet Malinda Markham was just 44 years old when she died in September 2012. I didn’t know Malinda intimately, but she and her intense, quiet poems made a deep impression on me. Possessing a singular voice and style, she struggled with debilitating depression for much of her life. We can only wonder what she’d have gone on to create had she lived. Malinda was not one to self-promote, but those who knew her work championed it. “A breathtaking debut, Malinda Markham’s poems bring with them an exquisite poise and restrained—yet sensual—elegance that is truly remarkable,” wrote David St. John about her first book Ninety-five Nights of Listening, which Carol Muske-Dukes selected for Bread Loaf’s Bakeless Prize and that was published in 2002 by Houghton-Mifflin. Bin Ramke wrote of her second book Having Cut the Sparrow’s Heart (2010 New Issues, winner of the Green Rose Prize): “No one else writes poems anywhere near these in felt intelligence, in glorious sensual detail.”

I met Malinda in 2005 in a Bay Area poetry group. She was bringing new poems for the group to discuss, several of which she included in her second collection. Although I didn’t connect with everything of hers that we read, I recognized her gift and creative ambition. Malinda had previously lived in Japan for several years, teaching and translating the work of contemporary Japanese avant-garde women poets. My mother was Japanese, so we shared a love for Japan and its culture. I liked Malinda, but she was private and we rarely socialized outside of the group.

A few months later, Malinda moved back to Tokyo to work as a financial translator for a Japanese securities firm. With an MFA from Iowa, a PhD from the University of Denver, and a prize winning first book, Malinda had decided early on that she didn’t want to teach in academia because it was more important to her to maintain close contact with the Japanese language. She saw translation work as a way to do this. I respected her courage and determination to carve out this new professional path while continuing to write poems when and as she could. It was not an easy path: the work was grueling and her hours were long. She was lonely in Tokyo, despite being immersed in the language and culture she loved.

In the spring of 2007 I traveled to Japan to visit my family and met Malinda for dinner at a Spanish restaurant in the Tokyo neighborhood of Tsukishima, at the edge of Tokyo Bay. We talked at length over paella and Spanish red wine. Malinda seemed upbeat and laughed frequently. She mentioned her loneliness, but said work kept her busy. We barely talked about poetry. Afterward I walked her to the subway entrance, where we said our goodbyes. I thought she looked fragile and a little unsteady as she descended the stairs, although the wine might have had something to do with that. It would be the last time I’d see her.

Three or four years later Malinda moved to New York City to continue her financial translation work. She wrote to me in January 2012 that she didn’t like New York; it was too cold and she felt more isolated and unhappy there than she had in Tokyo. She wondered if returning to San Francisco might help. I suggested ways she might connect with others. In February she wrote that she’d started a meditation class and loved it, so I felt hopeful for her. We continued to correspond sporadically. Her emails were always thoughtful and encouraging. In June a brief message from her was supportive of a career change I was considering. I checked in on her again at the end of July, but received no reply. The news of her death saddened me, but I intuitively understood that she’d exhausted her options and could not go on. “The glass island I called my own did not shield / the waves from me.” (from “What Gravity Demands”).

I think of Malinda often and keep her poems close to me. Her efforts to persist despite her pain were heroic. In an email written exactly eight months before her death, in which she enthusiastically agreed to recommend me for a summer conference, she wrote: "’Trust’ is really a key word right now, isn't it? I'm struggling with it, too, trying to trust that there's ‘something’ out there (the Universe) that wants me to fit into it and will help show me how. Cheesy though it sounds, I tell other people whatever I've learned along the way, so I'm hoping to get a positive stream going, if that makes sense. I mean, I hope for fulfillment, but I want to share it, too. If it comes. I mean, when it does.”

March 03, 2015

The season of renewal has begun to arrive here in our corner of Southern California. If you’re not from SoCal, you might be one of many who think we don’t have spring—or any “real” seasons, for that matter. I can tell you that we most certainly do. Since returning to this part of the world over two years ago, I’ve learned to appreciate the subtleties of seasonal emergence and transformation. If one pays attention, the signs are everywhere. The air is softer and the light takes on a different cast. A songbird is once again building her nest in the abandoned hanging planter under the eaves. Having soaked up our precious and all-too-brief winter rains, the foothills are blanketed in new green and the large shade trees lining the avenues bud and leaf out. Plum, apple, pear, and citrus trees are blooming, as are camellias. The shadows of rain clouds pass over the shoulders of the San Gabriels. Our valley is cleansed and smells sweet again. Summer’s prolonged heat blast is still a distant mirage.

With the arrival of spring, my mind is also across the Pacific, in my uncle’s garden in Kamakura—a historic seaside city less than an hour by train southwest of Tokyo and strategically situated between sea and mountains (to avoid invasion by warring feudal clans at the time of the city’s founding in the 12th century). My uncle and his family live next to Engaku-ji, the second of Kamakura’s five major Zen temples, on the same land where he grew up with my mother and their family. I try to visit Japan every other year or two, and in the spring, the hopeful season. This year I can’t manage a trip, so my Kamakura spring unfolds from memory.

The roubai (wintersweet in English) that we planted for my mother in 2004 usually blooms in late January, putting forth its waxy yellow flowers with their sweet, spicy fragrance. The Japanese consider roubai to be a harbinger of spring. This year’s winter was so cold that no roubai blossoms appeared, my uncle told me. In late February or early March, depending on the weather, the delicate dogwoods blossom, followed by the plum (ume) trees’ pink and white blooms and the showy, broad-faced camellias. By late March my uncle’s Japanese magnolias have flowered and the cherry trees have stepped out in their frothy dresses of palest pink; in their transient fullness they are glorious to behold. My favorite stage is not full bloom, but when the tissue-thin petals begin to drift down like snow, covering everything. The intermittent liquid cry of the Bush Warbler (uguisu) cascades through the branches. Also in March, young bamboo shoots (take no ko) begin to nudge above the earth and are harvested for their tender, sweet meat; to eat fresh bamboo shoot is a seasonal ritual and a spiritual experience (once you’ve tried it, plain or prepared in a myriad ways, you can never go back to canned). As the days warm, purple daikonsoh (radish blossoms), wild iris, and spidery forsythia line the roadsides and footpaths. By late April the hills are laced in a tangle of wild wisteria and the hydrangeas at Meigetsui-in—another Zen temple located a few doors down from Engaku-ji—begin to bud. By June throngs of visitors will clog Meigetsu-in’s grounds to photograph its famous garden’s hundreds of meticulously maintained hydrangea plants covered in hat-sized blooms.

My visits to Kamakura are quiet, shaped around simple, familiar activities. We share meals and sit in the garden in fair weather. My uncle and I take daily walks into town to shop, rewarding ourselves afterward with steaming bowls of tempura soba at our favorite soba shop. More than fifteen years ago we hiked the forested hills together; now he walks slowly, and with a cane—more time to admire the flowers, he says. We visit my favorite temples: Zuisen-ji, sparsely visited and tucked away up in the hills of northeastern Kamakura, and Hokoku-ji with its stunning bamboo garden. Tohkei-ji, which once provided sanctuary to women fleeing abusive husbands, has a lovely graveyard and a dimly lit, cozy teashop surrounded by verdant foliage. I like to visit Engaku-ji just before I leave Japan, entering from the west along the Philosopher’s path (Tetsugaku no michi). The great Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro is buried at Engaku-ji, his black marble tombstone unmarked but for the single kanji character mu (無—emptiness, nothingness). It’s the temple where my mother and her siblings played under the great wooden main gate (Sanmon), which dates from 1783. They played like all children do: in the present moment, innocent of a great war that was brewing on a faraway continent—a war that would change Japan, and our world, forever.

A little more than two weeks after his death on Valentine’s Day from pancreatic cancer, I am still acclimating to the reality of a world without Phil Levine. In my exchanges with some of Phil’s friends and former students, for the most part we seem to agree: Phil still feels very much alive among us. This is the strange and mysterious work of grief as it makes its way through us—tricks of the mind played by denial and disbelief. I’m not one for linear stages, for I believe grief has its own circuitous path and affects each of us in different ways. My own grief has arrived in waves since learning of Phil’s illness just two weeks before he died—a moment I’ll long remember. I turn to his poems, share them with others. I read his letters, in which I can still hear Phil’s clear, singular voice coming through his spidery handwriting, scrawled in fountain pen on lined sheets of a yellow legal pad. Online I listen to his interviews and readings, laugh out loud at his humor. There’s Phil on my computer screen at a reading just last summer—alert and vigorous, keenly intelligent, wisecracking for his audience, not missing a thing. Like the grease-stained factory worker in his poem “Coming Close,” I could reach out and touch him. And then I remember: Phil is gone.

As a teacher, Phil was warm, grounded, irascible, funny, opinionated, tender, confrontational… and deadly serious about the art and practice of poetry. He had little patience for foolishness or willful cleverness, in our poems and person. Phil’s no-nonsense approach to teaching, his passionate talk about poetry and his favorite poets, enlivened and inspired us, made us want to write better poems. He was tough on our work, but, in my experience, always spoke in service of the poem. Around the time he was awarded a Pulitzer for The Simple Truth, Phil said in a radio interview that in a poetry workshop there are a dozen people in a room and one of them is getting paid to tell the truth. His style didn’t endear him to everyone, but he wasn’t there to make friends. He was there to challenge us to be the best poets we could be.

In a poetry climate that can often seem driven by austerity, careerism, and self-interested striving, Phil’s generosity, his willingness to be available and responsive to poets and poetry lovers from all walks of life, was a rare and precious thing. He maintained regular correspondence not only with friends and former students, but with strangers as well. For many of us who studied with him, formally and informally, Phil’s teaching and friendship, his belief in us and our poems, made all the difference in our lives. I am still learning from him.

I’m grateful that Phil got to read Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine (2013 Prairie Lights Books), which I co-edited with Tomás Q. Morín, while he was well and could enjoy the tributes, could let the collective love sink in. It’s a book we put together in a spirit of inclusivity, holding in mind the legions of poets Phil taught and mentored over the decades, some of them now passed on, too. "Franny has decreed that I read only one... essay each day," he wrote to us. "She has a point. I might come to believe what everyone has written & go through the roof." Of course, that was Phil’s way of letting us know how deeply touched he was—that he, too, had received and benefited from his relationships with poets across more than five decades of teaching.

How incredibly lucky we are to have had Phil in our lives for a while. Despite early losses, his was mostly a good life—a long, rich, and fully lived life. Up until cancer caught up with him, he was writing and publishing new poems, giving readings and talks, recording poems to jazz accompaniment, traveling with Franny. Phil and Franny (who, in essential ways, made possible Phil’s life in poetry) nourished and supported countless poets, helped us to feel that we and what we make deserve to be in the world. Now, as Tomas has said, it’s up to each of us to pay this generosity forward. From the bottom of our hearts: thank you, Phil. We love you. We remember you.

February 26, 2015

In the late 60s, I take a contemporary poetry class with Jocelyn, the only female professor in the English Department. She acquaints me with the imagist poets and the lyricism of colloquial speech ("Come on! Wassa ma'? You got broken leg?" in William Carlos Williams's Paterson). I don’t know it then, but it is my first step toward a life in a direction I never even considered. Her husband, Dave, teaches English at Albany State. When he is turned down for tenure, students protest, to no avail.

Jocelyn and Dave do what many people talk about: drop out. She resigns her position and they buy land in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, Canada, embarking on a life as farmers.

In September 1970—a few months after graduation—my roommate Rich and I decide to visit them. Jocelyn sends us a hand-drawn map of the area; the destination is a mailbox labeled “Gopherwood.” Early on a Sunday morning, we fly half-fare to Ottawa on our expired college ID’s and start hitching from Ottawa at 9:30 a.m. At around noon, we get stuck in an intersection. Cars slow down, look at us, and drive on.

Finally a man picks us up. He has a French accent and is drinking beer. He talks about how he’ll pick up anybody because he was in the army for 22 years and was on the road a lot. He curses out the farmers in the area, and says they won’t pick up anyone who looks like a hippie. He drives us around town so that everybody can see he’s picked up two hippies.

He tells us he is an outcast because “I drink and I’m free. I get money from the army, and people are jealous because I don’t have to work my land hard.” He was wounded several times and his “legs are almost useless.” He drops us off a few miles outside of town, where we’ll have a better chance of getting a ride.

When it looks like there is no way we’ll make it to Barry’s Bay by dark, a bus appears with Barry’s Bay posted above the front window.Rich and I look at each other to confirm that it's not a moving mirage, then frantically flag it down. The driver points to the empty bus and says the only reason he is completing the run is to deliver newspapers. “I don’t know what to charge. How about a dollar?” Deal.

We get to Barry’s Bay at dusk, but the only cab driver in town has to deliver the newspapers. He gives us directions to a man who might take us out to the farm. The guy isn’t home but his father-in-law invites us to come in and wait. He is in his seventies and is chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. The only thing that interrupts his smoking is his convulsive coughing.

The son-in-law never shows up, so Rich and I head back toward town, to spend the night in the one hotel. We stop at the bar, where we meet some teenagers. They were raised in Barry’s Bay but now live in nearby towns and only come home to get drunk at the hotel.

The kids volunteer to take us out to the farm in their truck. It is a moonless night, and the driver speeds along the narrow gravel road, mostly on the wrong side of the imaginary white line. Everyone whoops each time the truck skids around a curve. Rich and I say nothing. If another car comes along we have no chance. We choose to risk death rather than be uncool with strangers (who may choose to kill us anyway).

We make it to the end of the road; we have to go the rest of the way on foot. Rich and I grope toward the light of the cabin, which seems a Christina’s-World away. As we get closer we hear a dog bark, then see a flashlight, which leads us to Jocelyn’s welcoming embrace. I have never hugged a teacher before.

Things aren’t working out well for Jocelyn and Dave and their three-year-old daughter. They have been working for years on a major anthology of contemporary poetry, and were counting on the royalties to subsidize the farm, but their publisher has been sold and the new owners dropped the project. Some relatives sent them an expensive shortwave radio to link them to the world, but they are going to sell it to get them through the winter.

Rich and I help harvest the last of the vegetable garden. Dave asks me to ride along with him to shop at the nearest supermarket. He parks in the back lot and takes me to the dumpster, where we scavenge for sealed packages of recently-expired chicken.

One morning Jocelyn finds part of a bear carcass near the front door. She deduces that a neighbor, knowing they can’t afford meat, left it there. Jocelyn marinates the meat for days, and my mouth waters whenever I pass it. Finally, on our last night, with winter setting in, the garden barren, and the radio gone, Jocelyn serves the bear meat. I chew and chew and chew until I can swallow, thinking of Chaplin eating his shoelace.

When I get home, I look up gopherwood and discover the only known usage is God's instruction to Noah: “Make thee an ark of gopherwood…”

John and I have worked together a long time. We are the godfathers of each other’s children. Every year we get together with a group of guys for a fishing trip and we don’t shave for a week.

We are basically the same type of policeman but we like to kid each other. John kids me about how I carry three guns but we both know it might save John’s life someday since he only carries one gun.

We have kicked in some doors together but mostly we just come to work and go home. I would not say we are cynical but after seeing the underbelly of humanity we don’t believe in the Easter Bunny.

We investigated a death on West Wayne Street. A nice two-story townhouse with a parking space in back that was empty so we parked there. We drank coffee in the unmarked car for a while and then went in.

There was smell of smoke on the first floor and balled up wads of burned paper scattered all over. The fire department had been there. Now there were just uniformed police and meat wagon guys.

A body was in the second floor bedroom, a white man about forty named Robert Wisniewski. The consensus of the uniformed police was that he died from inhaling smoke.

Since liquor bottles were lying around in the bedroom we thought maybe he got drunk, passed out, and inhaled smoke from the burned up wads of paper. But who was it that burned those wads of paper?

We found three pages downloaded from an internet dating site, each page with a girl’s site profile, her picture, and her name, address, and phone number written by Robert Wisniewski. Great! Fantastic!

We talked to people in the townhouse complex. Did Robert Wisniewski have a family? No. Did he have a car? Yes. What kind of car? One guy said an old muscle car like maybe a Dodge Charger.

The large number of burned paper wads was the odd part. Somebody put time and effort into that and it made a lot of smoke. But burning the house down did not seem to be the idea.

Back in the car we looked at the dating site pages. Three good-looking white girls, Shari, Lexi, and Joy. After we read the profiles and had a few laughs John called Shari and surprisingly she picked up.

John said, “Shari, this is Detective Cronin from the police. Do you know Robert Wisniewski?” She said, “Um, not really, we just went on one date.” “Well, we’d like to come by and speak with you.”

Shari lived in a typical single girl’s one bedroom on Surf Street with photos on the refrigerator and shit. She was blonde, medium height, sunny disposition and a decent body as far as I could tell.

We introduced ourselves. Shari offered us coffee. I wasn’t sure about her body because she had on a giant sweater that went down to her knees. No shoes, fluffy socks. We declined the coffee.

I said. “Shari, Robert Wisniewski is dead and it looks like there was some foul play.” “Oh, that’s horrible!” “Well, it happens sometimes,” I said with a laugh. “You went out with Robert Wisniewski?”

I showed her the dating site page. “We found this in his apartment so I gather you met through an online matchmaking site.” She started to cry. “It seems so sordid and sleazy now! I’m so embarrassed!”

Then she got control of herself and said, “We went to Greek Town but it was hard to talk because the restaurant was so noisy. I could tell he liked to drink but I’m not much of a drinker.”

I asked Shari if Robert Wisniewski drove her to Greek Town. She said yes he did. “Do you recall what kind of car he had?” She said, “I’m sorry, I really don’t recall.” “That’s okay, no problem.”

John and I looked at each other. We stood up. I took out my handcuffs. John said, “I’m sorry Shari but we have to arrest you for the murder of Robert Wisniewski. Why did you do it?”

The expression on her face was priceless. We laughed and when she saw us laughing she laughed so hard she got out of breath. John gave Shari his business card and we left.

Back in the car I called the next girl, Lexi. She didn’t pick up but we went over there anyway since it wasn’t too far and you never know what you’re going to find.

Lexi must have had some bucks since her address was an apartment building on North Sherman Road with a doorman, a black kid, behind a desk in the lobby.

Being a black kid he very quickly picked up that we were cops and with that out of the way I mentioned Gene Girolometto of the doorman’s union whom I happened to know quite well.

The name Gene Girolometto brought a smile to the black kid’s face. The kid must have had something on the ball or else Gene Girolometto wouldn’t assign a black kid to Sherman Road.

Was the black kid fucking women in the building? Most likely he was. In any case when we mentioned Lexi it obviously rang a bell. I said, “Do me a favor, call Lexi on the house phone.”

When Lexi answered the house phone the black kid said, “There are two gentlemen here to see you from the police department.” I motioned for the black kid to give me the phone.

I said, “Hi Lexi, this is Detective Coyne and I’m here with Detective Cronin. We’d like to speak with you about Robert Wisniewski. Remember him? The online dating guy?”

Like Shari, Lexi had only a dim memory of Robert Wisniewski. Unlike Shari, Lexi asked if she could come down instead of us going up because her place was a mess right now.

“No problem,” I said and returned the phone to the black kid. John and I then bid him farewell and went to wait for Lexi by the elevator. We just waited. No words were spoken.

This was police work, talking and waiting. You have to like talking and you have to get used to waiting. Now we were waiting and in another minute we would be talking again.

Should we have been a little more inquisitive with Shari, the first girl, because she might be the one who lit the paper wads on fire? No, because Shari had obviously not done that.

Should we have wondered why Lexi, the second girl, wanted to come down instead of us going up? No, because there were a million possible reasons for that and you could go nuts.

Policemen learn not to overly speculate about things but just to move things along and see if things fall into place. Finally the elevator door opened and Lexi came out.

White woman, about five nine, thirties, dark hair, looked grumpy, like if her life depended on it she couldn’t crack a smile. Very different from Shari’s sunny disposition in that respect.

Running shoes, black stretch pants, sweaty black t-shirt, messy hair, but still a good body from what I could see. Possibly even an excellent body. Her breasts were her best feature.

She launched into a long-winded explanation of how she was in the middle of her treadmill workout and was not prepared for visitors at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning.

The long-winded explanation continued about how she owned a public relations business which was not a nine-to-five job and how precious her workout time was.

John said, “With the demands your job places on you, you probably don’t have time to meet guys. That must be why you got on the website and met Robert Wisniewski, right, Lexi?”

“Right,” she said. “But I only saw him once.” “Did you go to Greek Town?” I asked. She gave me a look of surprise like, “Are you psychic?” I said, “Just a lucky guess.”

“But Mr. Wisniewski is no longer with us,” I continued. “His corpse was found in his house when the smoke detectors went off. Would you know anything about that, Lexi?”

She laughed. “Yeah, I hate Greek food so I fed him a poisoned octopus. Just kidding, boys. If this is what you came to talk about I can’t help you. I know nothing about it.”

She wanted to get back to her treadmill. No problem. She kept herself in shape. “But there is still one way you can help,” I said. “What kind of car did he have?”

“Car? A Dodge Charger. He was proud of it but it was not my type of vehicle. I like luxury cars, clothes, and restaurants. When I go to Vegas I stay at the Mandarin Oriental or the Bellagio.”

As experienced policemen we saw that Lexi, like Shari, was in no way responsible for Robert Wisniewski’s death. I gave Lexi my business card and we went on our way.

John and I have a system where, if one of us wants to call a woman, he will give that woman his business card and then the other one of us knows to back off.

When John gave Shari, the first girl, his business card I knew to back off and then John knew to back off when I gave my business card to Lexi, the second girl.

In general as luck would have it we have different tastes in women. So when John laid claim to Shari I was cool and he was cool when I laid claim to Lexi by giving her my business card.

Very rarely a situation will arise where both of us are attracted to the same woman. Then some discussion might ensue but that is unusual and we are grownups about it.

It’s the same way with driving the unmarked car or making phone calls. One day John drives and the next day I drive. Or if John made the last phone call, then I make the next one.

I was driving when we left Lexi and John called Joy, the last of the dating site girls. She picked up. “Hi Joy, this is Detective Cronin from the police. I’ve got some bad news.”

She said, “Who? What?” John had her on speaker. We were laughing. She sounded a little woozy, like maybe we just woke her up. “Robert Wisniewski is dead!” John shouted.

Then he said, “We’re coming right over!” and he cut her off. It was funny. Who knows what she thought. Maybe she would call the police. We were laughing about it.

Joy’s place was the top floor of a three-flat. She was around thirty, brunette, a bit on the heavy side, slightly disheveled, clad in blue jeans. Good body. Her ass was her best feature.

Joy let us in and after a brief exchange of pleasantries around the dining room table we made the nature of our visit known. Then there was the usual shock and gnashing of teeth.

There was also the usual dinner in Greek Town story, the disappointment Joy experienced around the whole drinking thing, and her ending the evening early in order to return home.

“Excuse me,” I said, “could I use the bathroom?” “Yes, it’s just down the hall.” “Thank you.” I did have to pee and after peeing I checked out the medicine cabinet. Nothing special there.

Returning to the dining room I made a side trip into Joy’s bedroom and noticed some keys on the dresser. One of the keys had a fancy Dodge Charger logo on it.

Back in the dining room I said, “You’re not working today, are you, Joy?” “No,” she said, “I work downtown nine-to-five Monday through Friday like a million other good little sheep.”

I nodded sympathetically and said, “Where do you work?” “I’m the office manager for a group of ophthalmologists called Paul Hurwitz M.D. and Associates Vision Care Center.”

At this point John knew something was up or else why would I be acting as if I gave a shit where she worked? I would only do that if I was playing cat and mouse with her.

I said, “When you went to Greek Town with Robert Wisniewski, did he drive?” “Yes, he did.” “But sometimes people take cabs to Greek Town.” “No, he drove his car.”

She gave me a puzzled and nervous look. John was having a hard time keeping a straight face. He knew I was playing cat and mouse but didn’t know where the cat and mouse was going.

“Do you remember what kind of car he had?” “No, I really don’t.” “Maybe it was a Dodge Charger.” “Maybe it was.” I took the keys out of my pocket and put them on the dining room table.

“God damn it!” she said. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” She was pounding on the table. She was blubbering. What if she got hysterical? I sat down at the table. “What happened, Joy?”

“Fuck!” “Joy….” “Fuck!” “Joy…” She looked at me. Deer in the headlights. “What happened, Joy?” It was an intimate moment. I started to get hard. But she would have to do about eight years.

“He pissed me off so much!” she said. “A man should realize that when a woman goes back to his apartment with him the woman rightfully expects to get fucked!”

I didn’t want her to blow up again. I looked at John. It was his turn. “He wouldn’t fuck you?” John said. “He couldn’t fuck me! His prick wouldn’t work! He was too drunk!”

Now silence reigned except for her blubbering. We let her cry it out. Finally I said, “When he couldn’t fuck you, you went around lighting wads of paper?” “Yes.” “Why?” “To make a mess.”

That was it. She lit wads of paper to make a mess. It didn’t occur to her that Robert Wisniewski, passed out on the bed upstairs, might die from the smoke. That’s why it was definitely not a murder charge.

What charge would it be? Some sort of arson maybe. John and I did not need to sort that out. The Dodge Charger was in the forefront of our minds. It was parked down the street from Joy’s apartment.

Over the next few weeks several things happened. We determined the book value of the Dodge Charger and we offered to take it off the hands of Robert Wisniewski’s next of kin.

On the one hand the next of kin wanted to recoup what the Dodge Charger was worth. On the other hand they saw Robert Wisniewski as a bum and the Dodge Charger had his cooties.

Ultimately a desire on the part of the next of kin for the whole thing to be over and done with played into our hands. We paid them ten percent below book for the Dodge Charger.

After we had a little work done on the car we were able to sell it for like three times book. We shared the proceeds with our lieutenant and we took everyone else out to dinner.

John wound up fucking Shari and I fucked Lexi a couple of times. A lot of women are turned on by policemen if you’re in halfway decent shape, which John and I actually are.

February 25, 2015

A sequence of thirty sonnets entitled “Ithaca.” I have lived in Ithaca, New York, part time or full time, for more than thirty years. In the Odyssey, Ithaca is the hero’s homeland, his origin and his goal, to which he returns following the Trojan War and all the subsequent perils, hazards, and temptations Odysseus endures.

Are you drawn to the Homeric epic for reasons beyond this coincidence of names?

It is as Virginia Woolf writes, explaining her attraction to Greek tragedy: the spirit of the ancient Greeks "has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to living more than half the year indoors." And I love the Odyssey.

Why the sonnet form? And why thirty of them?

There’s a reason the sonnet is historically the greatest lyric form in English tradition. It’s extraordinary what you can do within that precise fourteen-line structure. Twelve lines are too few, sixteen too many, and the unequal distribution of the sonnet’s fourteen lines into two asymmetrical stanzas allows you to make the rhetorical shift or pivot that is crucial to your argument or theme. The sonnet sequence gets you to do at least two things at once, because each sonnet must stand on its own and as a unit in a larger whole. In 1987, I finished “Mythologies,” a sequence of thirty sonnets, each consisting of seven couplets, and it went on to win a prize at The Paris Review and to anchor my book Operation Memory. I had the model of “Mythologies” in mind when I began work on “Ithaca” two years ago. Each was undertaken at a crossroad in my life.

What is the biggest problem you face as a poet?

Death.

Can you put that in a more intellectually respectable way?

I used to think death was an extension of the reality principle. Then I began to question that assumption. I felt that reality and necessity were two different things. I recalled that Freud’s thinking on the question evolved to the point that he introduced the idea of a death impulse, a drive toward death. Death is the end of life whether you define end as finish or as aim.

For nearly five full years you wrote a poem each or almost each day. Do you still do that?

Maybe I will try that again sometime in a more limited way. Recently I conducted an experiment in the opposite direction: for thirty days I maintained radio silence, refusing to write poems even if lines occurred to me.

In your New and Selected Poems you have new translations from Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri Michaux. Are you making more translations?

I’ve done about twelve or fourteen of Baudelaire’s prose poems and I mean to keep going. A couple of years ago, I translated one of Baudelaire’s most famous prose poems, “Enivrez-vous” (“Get Drunk”), just because I needed it for a dinner toast and was dissatisfied with all the many translations I had read. Alan Ziegler liked my effort and chose it for his new anthology of poems and prose in short forms, Short. Around this time, my friends Jim Periconi and Cheryl Hurley organized a Baudelaire soiree and invited me to take part. I said yes and went to the shelf and picked out Baudelaire’s Petits Poemes en prose, an old favorite of mine. (Way back when, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the prose poem.) The best translations I could find were done a hundred years ago by Arthur Symons and are a bit creaky. So I thought I’d try my hand at it. I started with “Le Mauvais vitrier” (“The Bad Glazier”). Believe me, it is a major challenge to render a work like that into clean contemporary idiomatic prose that manages nevertheless to convey a flavor of Paris in the 1850s. I got totally involved in it, worked on it for weeks, draft after draft. The next few came with less struggle, but by its nature translation is approximative; there are no definitive translations, which means that every time you look over one of your attempts, you feel like making an adjustment.

You are on record saying that you turn to “Tintern Abbey” when your own spirits flag. What about the same poet’s “Immortality Ode”? Do you agree with Wordsworth that for the inevitable loss of “the radiance which was once so bright,” there is adequate compensation “in what remains behind; / In the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be; / In the soothing thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering; / In the faith that looks through death, / In years that bring the philosophic mind”?

February 24, 2015

On February 18th, a cozy crowd of New School faculty, students, friends, and admirers welcomed Denise Duhamel, honored guest of the Writing Program’s Poetry Forum at The New School. Duhamel’s dazzling smile, vivacious voice, and energetic demeanor elicited the audience’s attention as soon as she walked into the room. She graciously took the time to chat with friends and fans before taking command of the podium.

Duhamel, who received her MFA degree from Sarah Lawrence College, has published numerous collections of poetry, including her most recent, Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award, Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), and Kinky (Orchises Pr, 1997). She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013. She has collaborated with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad to publish the anthology, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and served as guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013 (Scribner, 2013). Her play, How the Sky Fell (Pearl Editions, 1996) ran for four off-off-Broadway performances in 1997. Aside from being accepted into numerous international residencies, she has received many notable awards, such as from the National Endowment for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for Theater, and was named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.

“I’ve known and admired Denise Duhamel and her poems for nearly twenty years,” said Mark Bibbins, Part-time Assistant Professor and moderator of the forum.

“We were ten,” Duhamel chimed in, inciting laughter from the room.

“I remember being mesmerized as I still am by her openness, political engagement, fierce humor which as it so often does comes not only from places of anger and absurdity, but great tenderness and sadness sometimes too,” said Bibbins.

“Thank you so much for coming and for braving this [frigid New York weather],” Duhamel said when she took the podium. “I was so sure that this [event] was going to be cancelled, that I didn’t ask any of my friends to come.”

Duhamel read from her latest, Blowout, a book about a failed marriage, as well as a few new poems. Poet Barbara Hamby has described the collection as a book that “chronicles the journey from heartbreak to new love [and] so much more…It is a meditation on love and the sacrifices we make to create it in tenements, in condos, on boardwalks, and in our own hearts.”

Duhamel opened with “Old Love Poems,” which with its perfect honesty and nostalgic tenderness is sure to become an anthem for the broken-hearted.

“I can burn the pictures, but not the poems/ since I published them,” read Duhamel. “Once my cousin told me/ not to write anything down because the words would be there forever/ to remind me of the fool I once was/…there wasn’t really a beloved there anymore,/ just a strand of hair each left behind/ on the other’s scarf or pillow, a cologne trigger/ …“It’s still hard/ for me to accept the notion of love outliving the lovers.”

When Duhamel conceived the title Blowout, she was thinking about “a big party or…some kind of disaster, like when your tire blows out.” Perhaps the more obvious blowout, which she admits she had not considered, was “the kind that you get in a hair salon.” Fittingly, however, “If You Really Want To,” one of the poems in her collection, takes place in a hair salon.

“[L]oneliness is holding a piece of cardboard/ under your new kitchen cabinets/ as the handyman drills holes for the hinges/ that will hold the door in place,” Duhamel said, reading from her poem, “Victor.”

Although many of the poems she read reveals the demise of a relationship and a person’s efforts to survive the aftermath, Duhamel’s spirited reading of them

Many of the poems she read reveal the demise of a relationship and the to survive the aftermath, which from the mouth of another reader might have let the reminder of heartbreak linger on too long. However, Duhamel’s skilled and spirited renditions coax the spectators to turn their heads from looking backwards and to live on.

In “How It Will End,” Duhamel convinces you to befriend the couple on the boardwalk, even though you already know, you too, will have to take one of their sides eventually.

During the Q&A, the audience felt less like spectators and more like dinner guests joining in on Bibbins’ and Duhamel’s conversation.

“There are some poems that are better on the page and some poems that are more alive when read,” said Duhamel, when Bibbins noted the directness of her poetry and asked whether she was still inspired by slam poetry traditions.

She is also a fan of fixed forms, such as the sestina and villanelles, though she admits she writes in these forms when she feels “stuck.” Duhamel even enlisted her friend, Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator and faculty member at The New School to discuss her much-anthologized sestina "First Time: 1950."

“Don’t keep hitting the same note,” Duhamel advised those giving a reading or arranging a chapbook, drawing from her experiences at the Nuyorican Poets’ Café. “Let’s say Mark and I are slamming and he reads something really sad, I’m not going to compete with that. I’m going to read something hilarious.”

In Blowout, Duhamel shows you how to endure.

“[T]he plant…will bloom despite being uprooted,” she wrote in “Old Love Poems.” “It’s hard to believe when you are down to your last penny,/ when the soil is dry and rocky and full of weeds,/ when your love/ is freeze-dried into a metallic pouch and you are full of snarky rage./…Even if you no longer remember tenderness,/…you read the poem/ again, grateful, holding the words in your hands like a bunch of flowers”

Duhamel’s poems are like “a bunch of flowers.” They’re beautiful and diverse. They remind you that you are not surviving alone.

[A Save This Book feature from the Village Voice Literary Supplement (VLS) Number 16, April 1983. The piece was drafted in 1977 and finished, I’m quite sure, before I saw the January 1983 issue of the Quarterly Review of Literature devoted to Schubert. That, or I wanted to distinguish the real book—also edited by Theodore Weiss but beautifully and with the help of Schubert’s wife, Judith E. Kranes—from the hideous mélange of Works and Days (yes, why not drag Hesiod into it!). Can’t remember which.]

Initial A: A Book of PoemsMacmillan, 1961

Forays into a city of the mind that looks like a photograph by Berenice Abbott one minute and sounds like a song by Franz Schubert the next, these poems are the lifework of a man with a gift for dramatizing his discoveries of emotions presumed lost—discoveries as likely to take place on street corners as anywhere else—and a penchant for making delicate deals with himself, out loud but so nobody else in the rush-hour crowd can hear. David Schubert wrote this poetry in Manhattan and Brooklyn during the ’30s and early ’40s. Its pleasures are still keen, plentiful, and open to all, though Initial A will be appreciated most readily by students of the New York School’s Poetry Department, whose faculty members are Schubert’s direct descendants.

The John Ashbery fan will slip right into Schubert’s dream-induced logic: “Crying, you/Want to get off. But you know, you’ve/Just died. Indeed all the tears are/Counted, one by one, and safely filed away./Respectfully dried that were respectfully cried.” For readers of Kenneth Koch, there is prophetic playfulness: “Farewell, O zinnias, tall as teetotalers,/And thou, proud petunia, pastel windows of joy,/Also to you, noble tree trunks, by name/Elm . . .” And James Schuyler adepts will savor the fancy accuracy: “. . . cold/sky, the color of a quarrel. Premonitions of/disaster; of course, the month’s environment./Why do I keep thinking of you?”

But admirers of Frank O’Hara are in for the biggest surprise. Schubert’s elegiac spirit, nervous skill, and quick gusto anticipate eerily the poet of “Chez Jane,” “Music,” and “The Day Lady Died.” Eerily—and marvelously:

But then

From the corner of a mood like Les Sylphides,

Impossible, romantic as certain moons

In certain atmospheres, then you called me

From the corner of the street.

—“The Happy Traveller”

. . . now I wait for her to speak

The meanings which I must negate before

I am admitted to the gayest person.

—“Victor Record Catalog”

No! On the vehicle, Tomorrow, I will see

That man, whose handshake was happiness.

—“Midston House”

Schubert was 33 when he died in 1946, 15 years before Initial A was published, and the book’s flaws are those of a young writer: a few poems stunted by syntactic hot-wiring (loneliness), an overabundance of literary allusions (insecurity), and the annoying habit of breaking lines in the middle of a word (“originality”). His strengths indicate that he would have outgrown his affectations—in any case, as with O’Hara, what’s right about Schubert is more interesting than what’s wrong. Both men sit on the capacious twill lap of the rightest and wrongest American poet of all, O’Hara jauntily, Schubert with passionate sweetness. And although the song in Initial A has shrunk to a “fleeting memory,” heroically attenuated like the figures in a cityscape by Giacometti, the best of these poems prove that the self is as strong as ever.

February 22, 2015

Diving-suited, copper-helmeted, no thought of turning back,Led by his grey lead boots way, way off the beaten track,

He walks into Loch Ness. His unheard wife and daughterStand hand-in-hand on the shore. Underwater,

He ploughs on down on his own, bone-cold marathon,Stomping the loch not for any sponsorship he’s won,

Not seeking front pages, nor getting caught up in some blindingDamascus flash, but just for the love of that dark, reminding

Him and his folks here and all the folksBack home that, despite the old jokes,

Hoaxes, photos, no-shows, and tourists’ tales,Something is in there, out there, down there, flails and dwells

In inner silence. He wants to meetIt, to come back dry, dripping, and greet

The day from the loch’s beyond, its callCalling inside him. Wants above all

To sound the loch’s full volume right at groundLevel, be lost in it, pushed by it, sung by it, not to be found.

from Full Volume (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008)

Robert Crawford, an exact contemporary of Robin Robertson (see no.3), is passionate about Scotland – past, present and future. His poetry is nourished by his native land, its intellectual and practical achievements – especially in the sciences – and its literary heritage; he has written the best modern biography of Robert Burns (The Bard, 2009). Hugely productive as an editor, critic and poet, he is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, and has recently published the first volume of a biography of T.S. Eliot.

He has written in Scots, made versions of Gaelic poems and translated from the Latin of Renaissance Scottish poets, and is keenly attuned to the spring of rhythm and the pleasures of rhyme, as in ‘Full Volume’. Typically, this poem is both playful and questioning. Crawford knows that the myth of the Loch Ness monster feeds a profitable tourist trade, and also that beneath that surface lies something truly unfathomed, not only the second deepest loch in Scotland, but something in the human psyche that needs to resist discovery.

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Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of 8 books of poetry, 4 novels and 2 collections of essays & has co-edited anthologies. (Her most recent book of poems is TWIN CITIES, from Penguin, her book SPARROW was a National Book Award finalist.) She is professor of English/Creative Writing at the Univ. of Southern California and is former Poet Laureate of California. She is bi-coastal (many years in NYC) and has written for the NYTimes, LA Times & the Huffington Post. Awards include NEA, Guggenheim, Castognola Prize from poetry soc. of america, Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers award, Pushcarts, etc. Published & anthologize widely, inc. Best American Poetry, New Yorker, Paris Review, cover of APR, Kenyon Review, etc. - many anthologies. She also co-edited "Crossing State Lines: an American Renga" with Bob Holman - from FSG. www.carolmuskedukes.com

Howard Altmann is the author of two books of poetry, "Who Collects the Days," (Mosaic Press, 2005) and "In This House," (Turtle Point Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Poetry, Slate, The Yale Review and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in the anthology, "New Writings of the Americas: From Patagonia to Nunavut (Texas Tech University Press, 2015). A Montreal native, he holds degrees from McGill and Stanford and lives in New York City.

Labeled New York's best poetry series by such publications as New York Magazine and Time Out New York, the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series has hosted over 550 poets in more than 300 readings since it was founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman; it focuses on combining established writers with the most exciting young and upcoming poets. The list of past readers includes legendary American and international poets: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Richard Howard, Fannie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Marie Ponsot, Tomaz Salamun, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Anne Waldman and Charles Wright. Currently, the series is curated and hosted by poets John Deming and Matthew Yeager.

About the Venue:

A former single-room speakeasy (one of Lucky Luciano's favorites) KGB Bar was transformed into a Ukrainian socialist social club in 1948. To this day, the bar retains original decoration from its former incarnations, including a red hammer-and-sickle flag hanging from the tin ceiling, plus stained-glass Beaux Arts cabinetry, red walls, Soviet triumph posters, photographs, paintings, and sculptures. KGBBar is located at 85 East 4th Street in New York's East Village (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue). Readings begin at 7:30 PM. There will be one ten-minute intermission. No cover charge for admission. All readings open to the public. Though it is smoke-free, the massive pervasive cigarette cloud that existed as little as twelve years ago (and contributed much to the venue's conspiratorial air) is still easily imagined.

The next thing I knew I was waking up under a tree in Recreation Park next to a homeless man mumbling to himself. I was pissed off he woke me up in the middle of the afternoon. He looked at me dead in the eye. I lifted my head from a pile of leaves and a few stuck to my cheek, stained it orange. I must have looked like a pile of garbage. I told this man that I had no idea what he was saying then took a swig of warm beer from the glass bottle under my shirt. This man told me that there was dirt in my drink and when I looked down I saw cigarette butts at the bottom of the bottle. I must have found an empty bottle in someone’s garbage and grabbed it before making it to the park at dawn. After getting out of my waitressing job at O’s Pub at 11pm I hit the bars in downtown Binghamton then disappeared into the brush.

My routine at work involved hiding in the kitchen, and eating a few fries and peanut butter chicken wings then serving the basket of grease to some old man in a golf shirt. Sometimes this old man was my grandfather. He’d order two or three $1.10 drafts of piss colored beer during happy hour and I would try to pull myself together and make small talk. He paid with exact change and I would keep the money. By the end of the night I’d have an apron full of dimes and sweaty dollar bills. We’d reminisce about when I played basketball in high school and I’d try not to spill drinks. Carrying two beers was the most I could handle. I’d have to focus all my energy on the pint glasses, one in each hand, and take baby steps as I made my way from the bar to the table ten feet away. I remember biting the collar of my turquoise shirt and wiping my sweaty palms on my apron, crumpling dollar bills and not tallying the drinks on the check so that I could steal the money. This job didn’t last long. I passed out in the kitchen next to a bucket of sauce. I didn’t show up for work after that shift because I knew they were going to fire me.

The last shift I worked as a waitress in 2001 I licked the back of the toilet and had puke in my hair. The usual suspects came in and out of the joint and no one seemed to pay much attention to my reckless serving. Surviving as a waitress when I was twenty-one years old meant trying to act human and blend into society. O’s Pub was a little hole in the wall in Endicott, NY, a couple of miles from IBM, where my grandfather and uncles dipped computer parts in chemicals for a living. I think the land in this corner of upstate New York is poisoned with all those chemicals. And I feel like I drank that poison. I don’t trust my memory. When I think about the year I worked as a waitress I recall the times when I didn’t make it home after my shifts. I still wake up every day thinking it's a miracle I made it far away from that life.

Nicole Santalucia received her MFA from The New School University and her PhD in English from Binghamton University. She founded The Binghamton Poetry Project, a literary outreach program, in 2011. In 2013, Nicole won the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Prize from Arcadia Magazine Inc. forDriving Yourself to Jail in July—published in January 2014. Her non-fiction and poetry appear in The Cincinnati Review, Paterson Literary Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, 2 Bridges Review, Bayou Magazine, Gertrude, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, Burlesque Press and others.Nicole received honorable mention awards from Astraea Lesbian Foundation Writers Fund as well as the Allen Ginsberg Award. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.